February 17, 2014

Islamists Murder 90 in Nigeria

Suspected Islamist fighters killed at least 90 people in an early morning attack on a village in remote northeast Nigeria on Sunday, witnesses said.

The Boko Haram gunmen surrounded the village of Izge, near the border with Cameroon, spraying it with bullets, setting off explosions and burning down dozens of houses, they said.

"As I am talking to you now, all the dead bodies of the victims are still lying in the streets," resident Abubakar Usman told Reuters by telephone. "We fled without burying them, fearing the terrorists were still lurking in the bushes."

And in the spirit of fairness, in the Central African Republic the ethnic cleansing seems to be going the other way. Muslims are claiming this is a genocide of Christians against Muslims. I've seen some of the images coming out of the CAR and it's pretty gruesome. It's the kind of machete wielding close-up mass murder we had all hoped had ended in Africa. And the fact that some of the images show old-school cannibalism of the victims suggests that the perpetrators are animists, not Christians. They may call themselves 'Christians', but when you start eating your victim's body in hopes of capturing his soul and power then I'm pretty comfortable excluding you from even a very broadly defined Christianity.